Hours after the Supreme Court struck down his emergency tariffs in a 6–3 ruling, President Trump moved to a different shelf in the federal statute books and pulled down a tool no president has ever used. A proclamation issued Friday evening invoked Section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974 to impose an import surcharge on most goods entering the United States, initially set at ten percent and then raised the following day to fifteen percent, the statutory maximum. The surcharge takes effect February 24.
The message was clear: the trade agenda isn't going anywhere.
Chief Justice John Roberts wrote for the majority, ruling that Trump exceeded his authority under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act in imposing reciprocal tariffs on nearly all U.S. trading partners. Those tariffs, born from the April 2, 2025 "Liberation Day" executive order, had in some cases reached fifty percent on individual countries. The Court said IEEPA couldn't bear that weight.
What the ruling did not do is eliminate every tariff in the administration's arsenal. Section 232 national security duties remain untouched. And Section 122, a dormant provision that has never been invoked by a president until now, offers a distinct legal pathway with its own constraints and its own ceiling.
The distinction matters. The Court drew a line around one statute. Trump found another.
The proclamation cited the size and persistence of the U.S. trade deficit, a widening current-account deficit, and a deteriorating net international investment position as evidence of the "fundamental international payments problems" and "large and serious" balance-of-payments conditions that Section 122 requires. Trump described the action as following a "thorough, detailed, and complete review."
Several categories of goods are carved out:
The proclamation includes an expansive severability clause intended to keep the surcharge operative even if particular exemptions are struck down in court. That's a lesson learned from the IEEPA litigation: build the legal architecture to survive a challenge, not just to launch one, as Breitbart reports.
Section 122 limits any surcharge to 150 days absent an act of Congress, which puts the expiration around July 24. That is not a long runway. It is, however, a window.
Trump signaled on social media that the administration views this period as a bridge, not a destination. He wrote that "the Trump Administration will determine and issue the new and legally permissible Tariffs" over "the next short number of months." The surcharge buys time for the White House to construct a more durable tariff framework, one that either secures congressional authorization or rests on statutory ground the courts haven't yet disturbed.
This is the part that will define the trade fight going forward. A 150-day surcharge is a placeholder. What replaces it will reveal whether the administration can institutionalize its trade posture or whether the Court's ruling forces a fundamental recalibration.
The economic impact is real but narrower than the pre-ruling regime. According to the Tax Foundation, the surcharge applies to roughly $1.2 trillion in annual imports, about 34 percent of U.S. goods imports. At the fifteen percent rate over 150 days, direct tariff payments would total an estimated $43 billion, with net revenue after offsets around $33 billion. At ten percent, those figures drop to $33 billion and $25 billion respectively.
Yale's Budget Lab estimated that the effective tariff rate before the Supreme Court ruling stood at about sixteen percent under the IEEPA regime. After the ruling stripped those tariffs away, the rate fell to 9.1 percent. The new Section 122 surcharge at fifteen percent pushes it back up to 13.7 percent. Not where it was, but not a retreat either.
The Tax Foundation's applied rate estimates tell a similar story:
The full-year 2026 effective tariff rate, factoring in the 150-day limit, lands at roughly 6.0 percent with the fifteen percent surcharge, compared to about ten percent under the old regime. The clock matters as much as the rate.
The political class will spend the next week debating whether this represents a setback or a pivot. That framing misses the point. The Supreme Court closed one door. Within hours, the president walked through another. The question is whether the legal foundation under Section 122 holds, and whether Congress acts before July to extend or replace the surcharge.
The original Liberation Day order had excluded certain product categories from reciprocal tariffs, and the administration later expanded that exclusion list. The new proclamation similarly builds in exemptions and carve-outs. This is not a blunt instrument swung in panic. It is a structured response operating within a different set of statutory constraints.
Potential refunds to importers who paid duties under the now-invalidated IEEPA tariffs remain an open question. The timing and mechanics are uncertain, and that uncertainty will generate its own legal and commercial friction. But that is a consequence of the Court's ruling, not of the administration's response to it.
Critics will argue that a 150-day surcharge at fifteen percent is a shadow of what the IEEPA tariffs achieved. And in raw numbers, they have a point. But the trade deficit that justified this action didn't materialize overnight, and it won't be resolved in a single statutory maneuver. What matters now is whether the administration uses the window it just opened.
The 150-day clock is ticking. The next move belongs to Congress.